Out of the Dark
by oncethrown
Summary: Ianto survives the battle of Canary Wharf to shoplift groceries and stare at the lights of Lisa's monitors. An epiphany leads Ianto back to Torchwood at any cost to use them, and Captain Jack Harkness, to get back what he's lost. Series One gapfiller.
1. Chapter 1

It was the lights that got to him. That eerie green line blinking out from the bottom of the closed bedroom door. The noise became easily ignorable after a couple weeks. A beeping heart monitor quickly became white noise, the rhythmic "whoosh-choo…whoosh-choo…whoosh-choo" of the respirator almost hypnotizing. But the little green lights that never turned off, that burrowed through his eyelids, that he stared into whenever trying to get back to sleep after one of them had woken up, inevitably screaming, is what made him start sleeping out on the couch, leaving Lisa to beep and whoosh alone in the green-lit bedroom while he huddled with his back to the bedroom door, the darkness in every corner still tinged with green.

He's at the shops one day, with a hand basket full of cheap bread and bananas to distract from the pricier items he's stuffed into his jacket. Torchwood had clearly been using their severance package to say "We are ever so sorry you had to watch everyone you know be gruesomely turned into metal monsters who then came after your brain", but he wants to keep as much of that money on hand as humanly possible, he doesn't know when they'll need painkillers, or possibly even hush-money. He's dropping item cheap enough to buy and too bulky to steal in his hand-basket when his eyes light on a draft-excluder like it's the fucking Holy Grail. He seizes it from the shelf, wondering why he never thought to just stick something in the crack under the door in the first place, and drops it in the basket with a sigh of relief.

Then he realizes what his life has come to and nearly falls apart right there in Aisle Three. He leaves the hand basket on the aisle floor, surreptitiously slips the draft excluder in his jacket and leaves, a plan already forming. He's getting back into Torchwood, and those bastards are going to give him back what he lost.

His first thought is Torchwood Two, because according to all the reports he ever snuck a glance at, the one weirdo who runs it wouldn't notice him and Lisa setting up house on his fucking desk, let alone sneaking around a basement. But Torchwood Two is remote, underfunded and little bit pointless. He decides on Cardiff, which actually has a team and resources and capabilities. Torchwood Cardiff was something of a joke in London, but obviously when you nearly cause a planet wide genocide that is only averted with the aid of the man you were created to fight, the jokes on you. Cardiff's ad hoc administration will be easy to get into, and even easier to hide in. Ianto has total faith in his ability to become invisible to a bunch of chickens running around headless under the guidance of a man who he never once heard described without the describer beginning with a disparaging sigh. It takes him a couple weeks to find a flat in Cardiff and a way to get Lisa into it without anyone seeing her. Then he dives, head first, into his new project.

His only starting point is a rift activity monitor that Lisa helps him patch together out of parts scavenged from the ruins. He runs around for weeks like the creepiest form of ambulance chaser, finding random space junk in the middle of the street, an occasional weevil, and once in a while something he can't name. He only crosses paths with Torchwood three times, and he watches them from the shadows, trying to gleen what he can with the few, slightly damaged devices he has at his disposal. He catches names. He's already heard about Captain Jack Harkness. Everyone at Torchwood London was in on the joke about Captain Jack Harkness. The smug bastard in Cardiff refusing to play by London's rules and shagging anything capable of saying "Hello". The other names aren't anything useful. Suzie. Owen. Another woman whose name he can't make out. She isn't always in the field, but they talk to her over their headsets.

The only thing he really learns is that Captain Jack Harkness's flair for the dramatic wasn't a joke after all. A man running a secret organization, waving around a title in a manner as far out of date as his ridiculously flashy coat.

A search for "Suzie" or "Owen" is practically impossible, a search for Jack Harkness brings up nothing but a World War II volunteer. Ianto briefly attempts to dig into any sightings of a man running amok in period military. Nothing. He tries another tack.

His Torchwood Junior Researcher skills aren't as atrophied as he thought they'd be after several weeks spent building and maintaining impromptu robot life support and drinking steadily. It only takes him another week to find a couple conspiracy groups, picking through the complete shit to find anyone who seriously believes in a big blue box whirling in the sky, or has seen a blowfish monster running around in fancy clothes. He gains sympathy easily, having realized in his drifting years that blue eyes and a sweet smile will get you most things, and now learning that getting a little throaty when you talk about your sickly girlfriend will get you nearly everything else. He tries not to think about how talking about it, even with wildly altered details, helps.

After a couple meetings one of the members shows up with a police scanner that he almost certainly stole. He runs it during the meeting and every single one of the members titters when they hear the name "Torchwood" come up over the chatter.

Ianto leaves early, getting sad, empathetic looks from all when he tells them he needs to be home to help his girlfriend with her medicine. He waits outside until the meeting ends, and follows Scanner Bloke until they hit a patch dark enough that he'll probably escape being picked up on the CCTV. Ianto knocks the guy out, takes the scanner and after a little bit of camera dodging he runs home. He sets it next to the Rift Activity Monitor and waits.

Weeks of nothing. The random chatter of the scanner whooshing along the respirator and heart monitior. Until finally, viscous attack, someone bitten, assailant pursued by man in long coat. Ianto jumps into jeans that haven't really fit him since school, a coat he shoplifted just in case he ever got past Step One of the Plan "Find Jack Harkness" and onto Step Two "Get Jack Harkness to Notice You" and gets to the scene to find the Captain attempting to beat up a weevil with his bare hands.

He cuts into the fight with a pipe, bashing the weevil off the ridiculous man who represents his last chance to put his life back together the way it was supposed to be. The weevil sedated, Ianto wraps himself up in the same charm he worked on his conspirator groups. The Captain doesn't seem to care, but he doesn't have to. Ianto's put himself on Torchwood Three's radar. Jack will have to look up a civilian who knows what a Weevil is.

"By the way- love the coat," Ianto calls after his retreating back, just in case a little flirting would help.

Ianto really expected showing up with coffee the next morning to work. The Captain's running a team of what seems from the outside like two agents who bitch at each other like toddlers and a technician who weighs approximately two stone. And he was so easy to follow back to his "secret" headquarters that he really should be ashamed of himself. It seemed like a ballsy, resourceful move, and all it takes to impress people used to office coffee is a coffee from a pot that actually been washed.

It sends a chill down his spine when Jack mentions Lisa's name. Another when he realizes how easy it was for him to spit out "Deceased" so quickly. Almost as quickly as Harkness blows him off.

He can't believe how desperate he sounds when he sounds out the same compliment to the Captain's damn coat.

When he gets back to their flat Lisa's awake and more lucid than she's been since they got to Cardiff. He fills her in on everything that's happened. He's walked her through every step of the plan, but it scares him how little she remembers. She follows along, even chuckles a little at his sad attempt to flirt his way into the Captain's memory. Especially when Ianto tells her that he guesses the man is 15 or so years older than they are. When Lisa makes the suggestion that "it takes a clothes horse to catch a clothes horse," Ianto even jokes with her that the new pain meds are making her loopy. But she insists it's a good idea and Ianto can't see how it could hurt. He waits until she drifts off, then pulls one of his old work suits out of the dry cleaner bag it hangs in and waits between the rift activity monitor and the police scanner.

The rift monitor brings his attention to the pterodactyl. From there he just has to wait for the police to start swearing about Torchwood- worst kept secret in Cardiff- over the scanner. Which they are doing two days later. Ianto throws on the suit and thanks anyone who's listening that he knows every back way in Cardiff. As the SUV blazes toward him it briefly occurs to him that he should've thought through standing in the middle of the road. But Harkness sees him.

Apparently Harkness can't pass up a dinosaur and he follows Ianto to the warehouse. But now flirting and being enigmatic hasn't worked, being qualified hasn't worked and Ianto is genuinely desperate. He needs access to Torchwoods files, contacts, and equipment if he's going to save Lisa, and this arrogant prick who thinks he can save the world single-fucking-handed is standing in his way.

He crams disparaging, begging, and flirting (you smell like that naturally? Really Ianto? He chides himself) and pretending to be a pterodactyl expert into their dinosaur hunt, oscillating wildly, looking for something that'll get him into Torchwood.

He shouldn't be surprised that it's actually laying on top of the man that does it. The stupid attempt to catch him was all instinct, Ianto's got a chance to get through to their leader, the other two will just know him as the annoying coffee groupie. If this stunt gets the Captain killed he'll be back at square one.

Harkness is warm. He does smell good. "Organic" is the word Ianto tries to chase out of his mind. He suddenly realizes he hasn't been touched since Canary Wharf. At all. Not a hug from another survivor, not a handshake from the movers. Not a sympathetic pat on the arm from one of his conspiracy group acquaintances. Even with Lisa his hands shy away from her… metal surface. His chuckle dies out as he realizes this, and Harkness is staring into his eyes.

"I should go," He manages, feeling distinctly that he's done something wrong and desperate to get away from this man.

He hears the job offer in a haze, feeling as though he's reached the end of the road only to turn a corner and realized there are miles and miles left to go. And if getting the job after _that_ wasn't enough of an indication of exactly what his new "duties" at Torchwood Three are going to entail, he calls out after him, "Like the suit by the way."

Ianto goes home to find Lisa asleep. He checks her vitals, and crams the draft excluder as tightly under the door as he can.

He sits in the almost not green dark and wonders when (or if) he'll have to tell her he whored his way into this job for her. Or if he does tell her- if she'll remember.

He wakes up to his alarm in the morning, picks out a suit and kisses Lisa goodbye.


	2. Chapter 2

Jack does not pride himself on his brilliant hiring decisions because he is not stupid enough to think that he's ever made one. He's hired young and unattached people, he's hired the best and the brightest and he's watched them betray each other, get mowed down in battle, murdered execution style by one of their own, waste away due to some alien sickness, be taken by the rift. Or worse, taken by the rift and then spit back out. Even with as much pride as he takes in the team he has now, he knows they none of them was really the best candidate for their job.

Owen is a good doctor, but if Jack had even been pretending that he listened to anything UNIT told him to do he would have hired someone with more autopsy and forensic experience. Jack had hired Owen for his anger and his tenacity. Because Jack had given him answers about Katie's death and Owen had still tried to hunt him down. Because when he'd finally allowed Owen to find him, the good doctor had immediately socked him in the jaw.

He'd hired Suzie because of the way she never said a word about her past or her family, because she was cold and hard and because of the shadow in the back of her eyes. She reminded him of himself, over a hundred years ago when he was setting up ultimatums for travelers after tricking them into buying useless merchandise. And she'd been promoted to second in command because Jack had caught her in an outright lie about use of materials and she hadn't even blinked. There had been some lip service about her ability to strategize and for plain balls. But Jack's decision had been made when she'd looked up at him guilty as the cat that got the cream, and nothing in her expression had changed.

Only Toshiko had been hired for her outstanding qualifications. She was brilliant and talented and brave. Her shockingly intuitive understanding of alien tech made her the perfect person to dig through the gifts and curses of the rift and figure out how they worked. But even his decision to hire her had been in large part a "Fuck You" to UNIT and Torchwood London that gave him a pleasant tingly feeling from his hair to his toes.

And she had also had the other thing that was becoming a qualification for Torchwood. She was alone, ready to make Torchwood her life because she very literally had no other choice.

Jack had stood in the conference room one afternoon, watching the three of them at work in entirely separate places in the Hub, and realized that in the hundred years he'd spent waiting for the Doctor, he's become like him. Assembling and losing companions across the years to stave off his own loneliness. Thinking he can help them along the way, but never quite managing it. The realization makes him want to die more than he's wanted to in years.

And that's when he starts watching out for someone to bring in with… perspective. A life outside. Someone with compassion. Connections. A will to live that he's pretty sure Toshiko's still only attempting to develop and that Owen and Suzie don't even remember having had in the past. Some one that can help _Jack_.

So when the kid with the belt shows up on his weevil hunt with hollow eyes and dark circles and empty smiles, Jack just can't face another lonely brick in the barricade of broken people he's been building around himself. The fact that he knows what a Weevil is just serves to simplify things. He'll check him out to see if he should expect trouble, he'll retcon him, and then he'll go away.

Jack decides not to retcon him after he's read his file, divided by the desire to have a witness to London's idiocy available should he need one, and a reluctance to just wipe several years out of the poor bastard's head when he's got no one, but when the "and then he'll go away" part of the plan never materializes Jack starts to wish that he'd just broken out the ret-con.

When the team is out chasing a rift spike that leads them to an alien glove that needs to be dredged out of the reservoir and Jack nearly runs him over in the street, Jack is genuinely ticked off enough to back up, build speed and splatter him across the windshield. And the fact that Ianto's willing to risk becoming an unattractive pavement stain just cements for Jack that he is not what the team needs. But it's been a long damn time since Jack's seen a pterodactyl and he can't pass it up.

Ianto turns out to be decent hunting company. Snarky and intelligent, and the cut of his suit around his slim waist almost manages to distract Jack from the kid's desperation. The way he talks to the dinosaur is endearing and then, bizarrely he tries to catch Jack as he falls. They roll and laugh and Jack is beginning to wonder if he pegged Ianto wrong when they come to a halt and he finds himself staring up into those blue eyes. Ianto let his guard down in that moment, and he doesn't look cynical and lonely and desperate, he looks hurt and lost and young.

When he jumps off of Jack after that, ready to leave without the job he's been trying to nail down for the last few weeks, Jack suddenly can't just let him go. And Jack is starting to wonder if maybe Ianto, the only person who's come after him, flirting and smiling and seeking to recruit himself into Torchwood, rather than the other way around, might be able to provide some sort of connection and compassion. At least for Jack himself. It might be a place to start.

He offers him a job that doesn't exist, without giving him a time he's expected and Ianto disappears, shaking, into the night.

Jack goes back to the Hub and wanders around for an hour, assembling little tasks that Ianto can do while Jack tries to figure out what title he's actually going to put on Ianto's contract. "Assistant in Charge of Looking Good In a Suit" is going to be a bitch to get past the Powers that Be, and it's also going Owen and Suzie's first smirk-ridden suggestion for what he saw in the baby-faced Welshman.

When he hears the sirens going off and the door rolling back in the early morning he half expects Ianto to have figured out how to get in, but it's Toshiko, in early to work on one of her side projects.

"Morning, Jack," she smiles at him as she drops her purse and jacket off at her workstation and continues on through the Hub.

"Toshiko," he responds with a distracted smile, he turns as she walks past him, "You're in even earlier than usual today."

"I ran into some problems yesterday trying to put together text samples for the translation program I'm writing."

"Anything I can help with?"

"Only if you've been hiding someone with the magical ability to find anything in what is supposed to be the Archives."

Bingo. Jack had forgotten about the Archives a couple years ago. They were boring, they were hardly ever helpful, and he'd only ever gone back there to "update" his own file. Anything useful, dangerous, mysterious or potentially incriminating, he stores in the safe in his office.

Jack smiles at her, his widest, toothiest grin, and tells her that he'd been hoping she'd say something like that. Just then the pterodactyl shrieks over head. Toshiko nearly jumps out of her skin.

"What in the hell is that?" she demands.

"Pterodactyl," Jack says, "A good find by the new guy."

"New guy?"

Jack informs her that the team has expanded, and attributes Ianto with magical archiving abilities that he hopes the poor guy can quickly develop. Toshiko nods and Jack heads upstairs. He's expecting Ianto to be here soon. It's nearly the same time it was when he showed up in the Plas with coffee.

"Jack?" Toshiko calls after him, he stops at the base of the stairs and turns back to her, "Just so we're clear, I'm _not_ cleaning up after that thing."

Jack heads up to the tourist office with a job description ready for Torchwood Three's newest employee.

**  
Ianto adjusts his tie like it's a breast plate, an indispensable piece of armor, before he reaches out to the door of the tourist center. He's about to knock, for some reason that seems vaguely ridiculous. He tries the doorknob instead.

It's unlocked and Ianto steps in to see Harkness sitting, no _lounging_, behind the desk. He has his arms behind his head, his dark blue shirt, braces, and boots laying muddily on a pile of paperwork on the desk. Everything about him just as suspiciously out of date as his coat, and he's staring at the door as though he knew exactly when to expect Ianto. Ianto supposes Jack caught sight of him in the Plas on the CCTV, but briefly wonders how far Torchwood Cardiff's gaze reaches.

"Good Morning, Jones Ianto Jones," Harkness greets him with that enormous shit-eating grin of his, eyes sweeping over Ianto's body in a way that seems unnecessarily predatory, "You look… immaculate. Let's start you out with the tour."

Harkness hits a button under the desk and the wall opens back into a secret hallway. Ianto nearly rolls his eyes. Fantastic, he's gotten hired into a bad James Bond movie.

"Yes, sir," Ianto replies. Harkness quirks an eyebrow at him, but says nothing, then hops up from the chair in the tourist center and ushers Ianto in front of him.

Beyond the secret wall the Hub sprawls out in front of them. Wet and dank and dirty. Nothing like the clean airiness of London with its bird eye views and gleaming metallic lines.

Ianto has fucking had it with gleaming metallic lines. The musty, wet asphalt smell is inviting and he follows Harkness' lead through the scaffolding and bridges. Overhead the pterodactyl screams and swoops. Ianto imagines for a moment that it's just rubbing in the fact that its welcome was significantly warmer and less fettered than his own.

"She seems happy to see you," Harkness comments inanely. Ianto harshly reminds himself how important it is to keep the Captain happy with him and offers, "Perhaps she's expecting some chocolate like last night, sir." It's not funny. Harkness's laugh is loud and grating anyway.

As they come to a bank of computer terminals by the water and rust stained Torchwood sign on the grimy tile wall, Ianto wonders if part of the smell is coming from the pizza boxes and Chinese food cartons that seem to be colonizing every available surface. He'll clean them up once the Captain's finished with him, it's the perfect blandly helpful gesture that people appreciate and then forget. He starts his mental list of tasks and puts this on the top.

Jack introduces him to Toshiko as "the Archivist I Promised You" and Ianto just smiles. Fine by him, he can keep the archives. Junior Researchers at Torchwood London had to become very well acquainted with the archives. Jack also brags warmly to Ianto about the brilliant program Toshiko has been working on. Ianto is less interested in Toshiko's achievements than he is in the fact that Jack has only the vaguest idea of what Toshiko is actually doing. She's working on her own project, without his supervision or direction for no specific goal of the larger organization and he's looking at her with almost fatherly pride. Ianto's not in London anymore. He can almost feel the muscles in his shoulders unkink as he realizes this.

From Toshiko's computers Jack walks him around the medical bay, explaining that it's a much more pleasant place when Owen's not in it, and unfortunately he will meet Owen later. Then to Suzie's workstation, a large drafting table with an arc-welder and what looks like some sort of high-tech alien tool case on it. A wicked looking knife and a few other bobbles are ferociously organized along the table's surface. Files and folders are stacked carefully underneath.

Ianto walks a few steps behind the Captain, responding to things with a careful "yes, sir" or "I'll make a note of it, sir", or "Of course, sir." Pterodactyl feeding and mucking out he's not looking forward too, but he'll figure it out. He's amazed the Tourist Center has worked as a front at all, considering that it's barely staffed by an American and three Londoners who by the look of it can't get around Cardiff without their fancy GPS. He'll clean out the pamphlets from 1995 and see if Pterodactyls make nests. It's not until they get to the archives Ianto loses his façade of cool for a moment.

"Son of a-"

It's an underground warehouse of crap. A line of rusted file cabinets fades into the distance. Immediately inside the doorway a pile of metal and scraps and boxes exude a sense of "Oh right, I was gonna get to that."

Harkness laughs, reaches out and puts his thumb under Ianto's chin, every muscle in Ianto's body seizes, but before he can force himself to relax Harkness just gently pushes his dropped jaw closed. He grins at him again. Ianto breathes.

"Toshiko's more familiar with the archives than anyone else, I can see if she'll block out an hour or so to get you started."

"I'll be fine," Ianto says, "Though I think I'll be needing a cup of coffee before I start here."

"I'll show you the kitchen."

Owen and Suzie are in to work when Ianto and the Captain get back upstairs into the main hub. Ianto goes around asking the team if they prefer coffee or tea and how they take it. His suspicion about the coffee pot turns out to be true- it's filthy. He scrubs the pot and the mechanism out quickly and makes a note to bring in some vinegar to run through the pump tomorrow. Ianto brings out a tray and makes the rounds. Engine-oil black for Jack, with milk for Toshiko, nothing for Suzie, and tea with milk and two sugars for Owen.

He takes his own mug down to the archives, and begins on the Herculean task in front of him. It's a moment before he realizes that it's silent in the archives. When he sets his mug down on the coating of dust on top of the file cabinet he can hear the tinny clink echo all the way to the edge of the room. No whoosh…choo, whoosh…choo. No beeping. No little gasps of pain, quickly stifled. Even his footsteps are muted by the dust. He presses his fingers to his temples, takes a deep breath, chokes on the dust and starts cleaning.

When he gets home that night Lisa's breathing is labored, her heart monitor beeping irregularly, too fast.

"Lisa? Lisa?"

He pulls the nightstand drawer open and pulls out a bottle of pills. He wasn't home to give them to her. He'd figured on some sort of lunch break and then there hadn't been one. He'll have to set up some sort of IV. As he taps pills into his palm he realizes with a dull sort of horror just how fast she's been going through them, how quickly she acclimatizes to a new dose, and how low their supplies are getting.

"Lisa?" he says again, taking her icy hand in his, "Lisa?"

It's a moment before she seems to realize that he's there with her.

"Ianto?" she responds, it sounds like it's hard for her to speak.

"Yeah, it's me, it's me," He helps her swallow her pills, then tells her the whole story of his day. He tells her about the Hub, he tells her about the mess that stemmed from his attempt to requisition several buckets of fish and about standing at the top of the Hub's scaffolding trying to tempt a pterodactyl with them. She joins in on some gentle mocking about the pathetic tourist center front, but the meds seem to be kicking in, she's getting loopy, responding to his voice, but less and less to what he's saying. He holds her hand a little tighter, but she doesn't grip back.

"Anyway," he sighs, having covered everything that happened to him that day, "I'll be going in early tomorrow. Promised Harkness I'd have the worst of the piles sorted out by the end of the day tomorrow."

"And you always keep your promises," Lisa responds dreamily. Ianto sits up to kiss her and just can't face the cold press of her lips tonight. He squeezes her hand and goes out to the couch.


	3. Chapter 3

Ianto takes over all the menial tasks in the Hub, easily disappearing into all the little things everyone else is too busy to deal with. He delivers coffee and tea in the morning, after the first few mornings of smacks of appreciation from Jack and a warm smile and a thank you from Toshiko people stop noticing that he's behind their mug. Toshiko still says thank you, but doesn't look away from her monitor anymore. He has lunch delivered at around the same time everyday and when the team dashes out to investigate rift spikes he clears away the pizza boxes or carryout containers. He feeds the pterodactyl, he picks up requisitioned materials, and he concentrates on his duties, which his veneer of quiet competence is helping him pick up left and right.

Ianto'd had high hopes for the archives when Harkness had first assigned him there, assuming that they would actually have useful information in them, but instead the dark cavern is, for the most part, filled with hundred year old personnel files and broken equipment, it's like a really large trash bin. His daily searches for doctors with cybernetic specialties results in two piles. Folders labeled "Doctor, The" and a pile of pictures he could all too easily draw from memory and has to sit down, right on dusty floor, for a while after seeing. He needs to expand his search.

He offers to take a few cases of "retroactive case histories" off of Toshiko's hands one afternoon, when he notices her digging her fingers into her scalp and shoving aside her pet project with a sigh as Harkness drops a load of paperwork onto her desk. She shows him how to adjust CCTV records, personnel manifests, even hack personal computers and important government systems. He finishes her pile of paperwork, leaving her free to work on the more complicated demands on her time and leaving him the busy work- and access to her impressive software and the passwords to the elements of the mainframe that Ianto needs, but the Torchwood butler wouldn't have.

Owen gleefully shoves all his admin off on Ianto a couple days later and Ianto takes the wad of paperwork without a reaction, makes and delivers everyone's usual for their coffee break, and then hustles down to the archives to dig frantically through the stack, looking for medication requisitions and violently denting in the bottom drawer of the nearest filing cabinet when he doesn't find one and grabbing his sore foot through his weak dress shoe afterward. Owen, having found someone he can bully, starts dropping more and more admin on Ianto's emptied tea tray so that he can come in later in the mornings and spend more time screwing Suzie down in the vaults, which at least allows Ianto to make off with some minor medical supplies he doesn't think anyone will notice. An IV, some bandages for where the… welding or grafting on Lisa's leg didn't quite take and she's… in need of some bandaging.

Suzie is neither as accommodating as Toshiko or as ready to lighten her workload as Owen. She's distantly polite, without Toshiko's hint that she actually appreciates Ianto's offer, but she doesn't want her workspace touched, let alone cleaned, she hardly ever takes Ianto up on an offer of coffee, though she sometimes goes and pours herself a cup later in the day. She works steadily on her own projects and until Ianto can see a clear benefit in having access to her tools, the way he needs access to the medical supplies and the computers, he mostly tries to stay out of her way.

He allows himself to split into two people, Work Ianto and Real Ianto. Not Torchwood Ianto, because Torchwood Ianto was in London. Torchwood Ianto was happy with his flashy job, posh apartment and perfect, funny, wonderful, beautiful girlfriend and finally being as far away from Cardiff as he could get. Maybe his sister could build a new life over the old one, but Ianto had run, and now he can't even bring himself to call her.

He likes his work persona, he likes disappearing into Work Ianto the way Work Ianto disappears into the background. A suit without a face. Work Ianto mechanically makes coffee and sorts files and his biggest problem is the potential he may be eaten by a dinosaur who has confused him for a big fish. It's soothing.

Real Ianto starts stealing painkillers three or four at a time after he sees Suzie come back from a mission with a nasty cut down her back and help herself to the unlocked medicine storage without signing anything or even asking Owen. Real Ianto nearly bursts into tears of relief when Owen finally tosses him the medication requisition paperwork and says "Deal with this, tea-boy." Work Ianto calmly orders a ridiculous amount of morphine that no one at the Hub will ever find out about because Work Ianto will also pick up the delivery and then quietly destroy the computer record of the transaction while everyone has their lunch. When Ianto walks into Owen's medical bay in the middle of an unannounced autopsy, hands Harkness his coffee and ignores the way their fingers brush, Work Ianto walks away calmly so that Real Ianto can stumble into the bathroom and throw up for fifteen minutes over the blood and guts spread over the table. Real Ianto starts running out of bullshit assurances to whisper to Lisa when he gets back to the flat later and later every night and starts letting Work Ianto, still in his carefully pressed suit, change her bandages and check her IV, letting the sounds of drugged murmurs and pained sighs and the sickening smell somewhere between engine oil and blood wash around him. If he could only sleep in his suit Work Ianto might even be able to ignore the green light.

**

The one thing that Work Ianto and Real Ianto both have trouble dealing with is Harkness. The man's a devoted flirt- he practically hits on the Weevils. The only person Ianto never sees on the receiving end of what a London operative would have cited as sexual harassment by now is Toshiko, and even the way that Harkness treats her is rather more familiar than seems appropriate coming from the boss of the organization.

Suzie is second in command, capable and cold, utterly unfazeable and her slightly condescending attitude toward Jack makes it clear she thinks of him as utterly non-threatening and his expression of what seems like obligatory member-of-the-team affection more or less not worth noticing. His occasional waist grabs and shoulder squeezes as un-nuanced and meaningless as a dog setting its head in her lap. The way Jack grabs Owen by the upper arm when giving him orders or getting his attention is clearly a reminder of dominance that Ianto quietly thinks could be stepped up to something more obvious, like a knock on the jaw or a blow to the nose. Jack's treatment of Toshiko, touching her shoulders, or hair, is simple affection for her.

But Ianto is on the bottom rung of the ladder, with a couple busy-work jobs and no indispensable skills, he was desperate to be hired and his ears still burn when he remembers how he was actually hired. All those things considered, he's been expecting some sort of… aggression from the man by now. To be pinched or grabbed or groped or something. But Harkness is relatively standoffish. Their fingers brush with Ianto delivers his coffee, but not every time and never with any indication that it's not an accident. The Captain pressed his fingers against the sides of Ianto's neck last night and told him to go home and get some sleep. When Ianto's at the computer and Harkness asks him for something he'll cup his shoulder, but even for a regular boss that's hardly crossing a line. Recently he's been rubbing Ianto's back a little when he does it, which is, but the captain isn't a regular boss.

The fact that Harkness is still the only person that touches Ianto at all does nothing to help his objectivity. By the end of his first month Ianto is doing his best not to think about it anymore. He's getting further into his doctor research, looking for names and looking further into the ones he already has, making certain he doesn't contact anyone who might turn him and Lisa in, and trying to find someone willing to help them. Then he still has the archives, Myfanwy, as he named the pterodactyl in a fit of melancholy earlier in the week, and all the tasks he's been accumulating since he was hired. He's in the Hub basically all the time, he's been flirting with Harkness to misdirect any suspicions the man may have and the thing he's been trying so hard to avoid- moving Lisa into the Hub itself, is becoming inevitable as he just can't leave her alone for as long as he's had to recently. He's going to have to be in the Hub as often as Harkness is, and because the man never seems to leave there's probably one way of managing it without arousing suspicion.

Besides, until Lisa's whole again he _cannot_ lose this job. Even if Harkness bends him over the conference table in the middle of lunch, there is exactly fuck-all he can do about it.

So he hides in his suit. He archives. He files. He pterodactyls. He smiles and flirts and coffees and hopes that the only reason the Captain flirts with him is the same reason that he flirts with everything else- because he's there.

Then a couple days later, Ianto has a breakthrough. He finally finds a doctor. Specialization in cybernetics, history of experimentation, and even a couple of lawsuits and firings due to taking cases beyond the limits and regulations of his grants.

Ianto spends most of the day hiding out in the archives, painstakingly constructing a letter to send the man. Enough information to peak his interest, not enough for him to figure out that he or Lisa had anything to do with Canary Wharf. Hinting at compensation, but absolutely not promising it. All scrawled out on a yellow legal pad that's obviously older than he is, maybe even older than Harkness is. Stupid Archives.

Everyone should be on their way out this time of night. Toshiko's made it completely impossible for any activity from the Hub computers to be tracked. Ianto just has to bang the letter out, send it and erase everything he's just done from the internet history and it'll be like it never happened.

He tears the page off the legal pad, and the four pages under it. He folds the four blank, but possibly impressed upon pages, and stuffs them into his jacket pocket, then he folds the page with the letter on it and stuffs it into the other pocket. He ditches the legal pad in the back of the bottom drawer of the oldest filing cabinet and goes upstairs.

The Hub's empty. No footsteps, no voices. Even if everyone's gone home for the night, odds are the Captain's still lurking somewhere. Ianto knows he should just go home, check on Lisa and send the letter at the next time that he can guarantee the Hub's empty, but if this is a dead end he needs to know. He's waited for months, Lisa's getting worse, he can't face waiting for the next rift spike that calls out the whole team. He's got the letter memorized. He'll type fast.

Ianto walks, his brisk, fast but unobtrusive butler walk, to the computer terminals, and signs himself in under Owen's information. He opens up a new email and starts typing, trying to do that briskly as well, but his façade slipping in the empty room where he has no one to perform for. He types frantically, finishing the letter but not hearing the boots coming up to him.

"You shouldn't be here," Harkness says. Ianto jumps as he hits the send button. "Oh, sorry, sir," Ianto starts, Harkness has never commented on his hours before.

He exits the screen, heart pounding, feeling the guilt burning in his face as he stands up, being careful to block Harkness's view of the computer, "I've finished here, I'll just be-" he stammers.

"No," Harkness interrupts him, "I just meant that it is possible to overdo it. Here. Brought you this."

He hands Ianto the mug in his hand, and Ianto sits on the edge of the desk, still blocking the computer and takes a sip. If Ianto's not shocked enough at someone bringing him coffee instead of the other way around, it's also coffee just the way he takes it. Two sugars, just a little bit of cream. He looks up at Harkness in what feels like horror, the Captain's been watching him, but apparently just comes off as overwhelmed gratitude.

"Th-thank you," he manages, taking another sip. Harkness smiles, as though rather pleased with himself, "It's rather late for you as well isn't it?"

Harkness shrugs, "I live here."

Ianto feels like a stone's dropped into his stomach, yet another kink in the plan, "Oh," he offers.

Harkness shrugs again, "What it lacks in charm it makes up for in convenience," he clears his throat, "So what are you working on this late? And it better not be Owen's admin."

Harkness sounds casual, almost hesitant, strangely genuine. Later, when Ianto's lying on the camp bed in his bedroom, punishing himself with the bright green light of the monitors and clinging to Lisa's icy hand, he will assure himself it was the only way to cover up for how suspiciously flustered he was, it was inevitable and it put him exactly where he needed to be in Harkness's mind. Harmless.

Ianto reaches his hand out to Harkness's cheek, sets his mug down and kisses him, nudging the computer's off button with the back of his heel and pulling away from Harkness as he hears the monitor click off.

"This" he says, bracing himself before the Captain kisses him back. Ianto's never kissed a man before, and it's strange. Harkness is clean shaven, but it's the end of the day and his cheek rasps strangely against Ianto's hand. His flat cheek and strong jaw fit into Ianto's palm oddly. He smells wrong. He's not Lisa and the longer Ianto tries to pretend he is the stranger this feels. The more wrong it feels. He pushes Work Ianto into the fray, which helps. Work Ianto isn't cheating on anyone, and he's the one who's been flirting with Harkness this whole time. Let him deal with it. But Work Ianto can't protect him from his body, which is unaware of the two separate minds and fully aware that it hasn't been kissed back in months. Which starts in surprise when Harkness cups the back of his neck, because Lisa can't anymore. Which shivers when Harkness runs a hand down his back around his waist and starts inching up his chest. Real Ianto sits quietly in the back of his head, letting his body enjoy contact for the sake of contact and letting Work Ianto keep everything under control.

Then Harkness tugs at his tie and Ianto panics.

"No!" he slaps the Captain's hand away and places his hand tightly over the knot, "I need my tie."

Harkness takes a step back and Ianto freezes- shit. Shit. He moves his hand a little ways down the knot but doesn't manage to take his hand off the tie. He can't hide in his suit if Harkness takes it away from him.

"Sorry," Harkness says slowly. He sets his fingers experimentally against Ianto's shoulder, then, when Ianto lets him, lays his hand flat against Ianto's arm.

"No, I'm sorry," Ianto asks, trying to backpedal without any track behind him, "I didn't mean-"

"Ianto, has there…" Harkness starts, stumbles, starts again, "Has there been anyone since Lisa?"

Hearing Harkness say her name is like having his fingers slammed in a drawer, but Ianto forces himself to latch onto it. He shakes his head, "No. There hasn't."

"Okay then," Harkness says, Ianto watches, gulps, as Harkness hand moves across his shoulder to his tie. His other hand pulls Ianto's hand, trying not to resist, away, and he tightens Ianto's tie, adjusting it a little, putting it back where it was, "There. Keep your tie."

Ianto keeps his gaze directed toward the floor, working on a way to fix how he's fucked this up, "Thank you, sir."

"You can call me Jack you know. Everyone else does," Jack says, smoothing Ianto's tie again, "Besides if you call me "sir" right now it makes it sound like you're, you know, _doing this on the company time_."

Ianto forces out a chuckle, and reaches out for Harkness's hand, "I'm not. I'm really not," It sounds like such a lie in his ears, but Harkness squeezes his hand back a little bit, "You know what… Jack…it's a little late for coffee."

"You want me to walk you out?"

"Actually I was thinking about the scotch in your office."

Harkness grins and steps back so Ianto can get to his feet and they walk into his office. The Captain pours two small glasses, they knock them back too fast considering how expensive the scotch is, and then Ianto kisses him again, this time not allowing himself the luxury of hiding behind anything but the very slight buzz of the scotch.

Harkness doesn't touch his tie, doesn't undo a button, doesn't touch the belt buckle, just gently explores over Ianto's clothes. Across his back, his sides, his shoulders, his neck, never below his belt and Ianto concentrates on every move, forcing himself not to think about Lisa this time, which does make it a little easier.

After a while, the captain pulls back, probably bored, they're both too old for this, and Ianto damn well knows it. Harkness smoothes Ianto's jacket a little.

"Come on, let me walk you out."

Ianto grabs his coat, and Harkness walks him out to the parking lot, kissing him again at the door.

"Thanks, Jack," Ianto says at the door, unsure if he means it or if he's just trying to overdo the "harmless and pathetic" persona he's working on. Jack's Ianto, he thinks with a sick twist in his stomach.

Harkness smiles and Ianto walks out.

He doesn't realize that he still smells like the captain until he gets home. He goes directly to the shower. He scrubs his whole body down three times, and shampoos twice, but can still smell Harkness on his hands when he finally goes pruney, turns off the water, towels off, puts on the pajamas he left hanging on the hook when he showered this morning and goes to Lisa's bedroom- their bedroom- and sees her, lying still and gleaming in the green silence.

"Lisa?" He whispers. "Lisa?"

There's no response.

He drags the camp bed he used to sleep on most nights out of the corner over next to her gurney and lies down on it. He grabs her hand and kisses it, the fingers, where she's still flesh.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he says. Then in a whisper she can't hear he starts promising her wild things. Trips across the world, a house in the country, and that everything will turn out okay.


	4. Chapter 4

Ianto runs over the plan in his head again.

He's found a doctor. The first bloke he emailed sounds thrilled about the opportunity. He's willing to come to Wales all the way from Ohio, and they've been emailing back and forth to establish logistics. When Ianto mentioned that for any initial procedures he could relocate Lisa somewhere with medical facilities, the man was even more eager.

So, Ianto's spent last week setting up one of the unused sub-basement for Lisa. He's welded together a gurney out of a bunch of old crap from the archives, and he's got power set up. All he has to do once he gets her into the basement is plug in her machines and if he needs to, he can unload her later. He's a got a generator that can maintain her life support systems for at least 5 hours, and back at the flat he has Lisa, the generator and the entire life support crated up and ready to move.

Harkness has approved Suzie's creepy glove project for field tests, he's sent everyone out for lunch, and when they get back the team is taking the SUV out for a tour of recent murder victims in Cardiff, starting in the morgues Ianto has lined up- far away from the Bay. Ianto is guaranteed at least a four hour window to get Lisa into the Hub.

He's commandeered a lorry from a place nearby, he can get to his flat, get Lisa's crate to the Hub, into the freight elevator, down to the sub-basement, return the lorry, and get back to the Hub in three and a half hours. Even if the team gets back at the four hour mark, all Ianto will have to do is make some coffee and possibly throw away some food wrappers before disappearing unnoticed back into the "archives" to settle Lisa in.

"Ianto? You with me?" Harkness pants. Ianto kisses him quickly, clenching his fingers in Harkness's hair, and throwing in a whimper for good measure. This is not the time to get distracted. He needs Harkness pacified, satisfied, dressed, and out of the Hub with the team in the next 15 minutes.

Harkness is sitting in one of the conference table chairs, trousers around his ankles, boots still on, braces hanging over either side of the chair. Ianto's in his lap, straddling him, still _technically_ dressed, but thoroughly unbuttoned, tie flung over the back of the chair next to them, lesson learned after ruining one of his blue ties last time.

Harkness' hand is doing an interesting twist and glide thing up and down his shaft, over and over, Ianto tries to concentrate on that.

He really hates this. He's gotten over most of the guilt. He's doing this _for _Lisa, it's not as though she can hold this against him. And while it's still… really uncomfortable, at least the Captain's a good kisser, and not some wheezing, obese, halitosis ridden, old lecher like basically anyone in charge of anything at London. While he does it begrudgingly, Ianto has to admit that Harkness really isn't so bad. He's leading a small team against the full fury of the rift, refusing to let it do damage on the local populace while London was inviting horror home to roost. Ianto's been to a couple of retirement parties for London operatives, but the one thing he has learned in the archives is that no one in Torchwood Three hits the big Three-Oh.

Plus, as long as he's begrudgingly appreciating things, after the incident with his tie that first time, Harkness has been… kind of sweet with Ianto- this, a semi naked hand job in the middle of the day with the shades drawn, is about as far as Harkness has pushed this… whatever this is to him. Though Ianto really wishes he could refuse to sit in Harkness's lap. It's very… Hugh Heffner and a Playmate, which in addition to being an unflattering comment on the Captain's age, makes Ianto the augmented, bleached, whore in the situation.

Ianto knows that Harkness wouldn't mind a "no" here or there, he'd probably find it coquettish, (Ianto sighs mentally and squirms closer to Harkness as they both increase the pace of their hands, he wishes there was a manlier word than coquettish), but things are finally coming together and if this is what Harkness wants before he leaves Ianto alone in the Hub for the better part of the day, Ianto's not going to risk a "no".

Harkness grabs the back of Ianto's head and pulls him closer, setting his mouth to Ianto's nearly always concealed neck and nibbling, scraping, biting, before moving up to Ianto's ear.

"Come on," Harkness pants, "Come for me."

Ianto moves his hand over Harkness's and squeezes it, hard, Harkness takes the hint, Ianto returns his hand. It's probably overdoing in, but Ianto pants "Oh, Jack," into the Captain's ear as he comes.

**

Ianto is by and large the most interesting person Jack has fooled around with at Torchwood. He is not the first. Not by a long shot, not by any stretch of the imagination, but most definitely holding his own as the most interesting. And cute. Jack has racked up a lot of hot people over the years, but not nearly enough cute ones. Jack likes the way Ianto's cheeks apple when he gets the usually dour young man to smile, the way he flushed so pink when Jack had first gotten a little moan to hiccup out of him, the way he holds so still while Jack unbuttons his jacket and waistcoat and dress shirt. The way he just kind of bites his lip when Jack lightheartedly complains about him wearing so many clothes.

Plus there's something exciting and kind of exotic about how the whole thing is playing out. It's not a quick dirty "Thank goodness I'm still alive" fuck on his desk, right on top of all the paperwork like it was with Robert, Gladys, Alex, Greg, Carol, Andras, Lucia, Billy or anyone else on that list- quickly forgotten about once everyone's belts, stockings, or in one case bloomers were done back up. It's certainly not the love at first sight that Estelle shot him through the heart with.

It's a lot like that late afternoon cup of coffee Ianto delivers to his desk. A reinvigoration and a comfort. Ianto gives Jack an opportunity for some humanity after yet another death, dismemberment, days work. To take care of someone who wouldn't respond to a little heart's ease with Suzie's impatience, or Owen's cruel cynicism, or Toshiko's distant reserve.

And Ianto's turned out to be a brilliant hire on top of it. He's incredibly capable, he's gone from tea-boy to practically facilitating the daily routine of the Hub in a ridiculously short amount of time. Personally though, Ianto's still hesitant, in need of a little coaxing. Jack's not sure how much of that is Love-of-his-Life-Lisa, who Ianto's never said a word about (other than "deceased" and "no there hasn't"), or the age gap (oh, if Ianto only knew), or maybe some discomfort with the boss/employee dynamic. Whatever it is Jack's enjoying the hell out of it. Jack's lived through several decades way more sexually frigid than this one, Ianto's hardly the first person he's gone slowly for, but he's one of the only Torchwood employees, nearly all of whom tend to be on the side of gathering rosebuds while they may. But the slow reveal of Ianto's pretty white skin peeking out as he unbuttoned his shirt was such a better reward after Jack had to work for it.

Jack's starting to wonder if Ianto might even be a virgin, but readjusting 51st century expectations and a hundred years of experience for a kid in his early twenties in this still comparatively rigid century isn't easy. And while for most of this century Jack would have expected a man who wound up on his desk (or on the couch out in the hub, or in the back of the SUV) to declare his experience with other men or lack thereof in some way- things were changing out there. Jack had no intention of letting go of his braces or coat, but he had a little more interest in keeping up with sexual fashions. As long as Ianto fancied Jack, Jack didn't particularly care who else he fancied or had ever fancied in the past. And after what had been a long, rainy, cold, wet and thoroughly unpleasant day, what Jack fancied most, was getting out of his wet things, drying off, and then getting Ianto out of his dry things.

"Oi, Jack!" Owen snaps, "If you could pay attention while you're driving that would be much appreciated. Some of us have heard enough corpses screaming today and don't want to spend this entire trip imagining ourselves as one. Thank you."

"It's an avenue of research worth pursuing Owen," Suzie snaps back. The two of them have been on each other's nerves even more often than usual recently. Jack ignores it. It's an annoying reminder of why he shouldn't be trying to get Ianto into bed, and an extremely disheartening reminder of the ways in which he's failed to make any of these people less broken. Despite their trysts, Suzie clearly has no idea why watching people die all day is particularly hard for Owen, Jack himself has no idea why bringing them out of the dark for seconds and minutes at a time is so important to Suzie, and Toshiko doesn't seem to be picking up on the extra edge under Owen and Suzie's bickering.

"And if we want to pursue it, then I need to practice using the glove, and-"

"I've got another possible homicide in Llangafelli Lane," Toshiko announces, tapping her monitor, "We're nearly there, could swing by, someone a little fresher for our last try for the day?"

Jack doesn't heave a disappointed sigh as he takes the turn, or when they go back out into the dumping, pouring rain, or when they fail yet again to do anything but frighten a poor dead kid and watch him realize that there's nothing else. That there's just mortal coil, and the undiscovered country is a lie.

The one upside of the last try of the day for Jack is getting to fluster the nosy PC with the cute gap in her teeth.

**

"I know it's a little dark and musty, but you're safer here than you were in the apartment, and the doctor in Ohio is supposed to email me today about when he's available," Ianto tells her, agitatedly tapping his fingers on the frame of her gurney, "And this adjusts a little, so… maybe, I could get you a TV or something, I mean, yeah, we sold ours, but I could find something, and the library has videos and I can take my breaks down here with you."

Lisa gives him a brave sort of smile, "Yeah, that would be good." Her words are still a little slurred from the pain killers.

"Yeah, it will," Ianto sighs, "Okay, listen, I have to go check my email and make some coffee, but I'll come back down to see you before I go home. I promise."

"Okay."

"Okay."

Ianto leans down to kiss her, missing the feel of her, feeling like he's papering over Harkness with her. Heart bursting with a sort of carefully held in joy at finally being able to put a little bit of hope into that kiss. He reaches up to brush over her hair and stops just before he realizes that he's just going to feel the cold metal on his fingers. He moves his hand down, touching his finger tips carefully to the exposed skin her chest, just at the hollow of her throat. Suddenly she presses her tongue to the seam of his lips and he opens them with the first honest gasp he's let out all week.

God he misses this, misses her, wants her, can't believe how long it's been. This is the first time kissing her has actually aroused him since- He flattens his hand against her chest and the cold metal presses into his hand. Right.

He pulls out of the kiss slowly, not wanting her to think that it's disgust, cause that's not exactly what it is.

"You're amazing Ianto," Lisa tells him, her voice low and husky, "I love you."

"I love you too. See you soon."

He kisses her again, a quick peck to the lips and goes upstairs.

He starts the coffee pot, goes to the kettle and decides not to even bother turning it on. This time of night, if Owen even comes into the Hub, it'll just be to grab something and leave. He lets the coffee brew while he finishes the day's washing up, then he pours himself a cup and goes to the computers to check his email. Toshiko checked in earlier to say that they were making one last stop before coming back to the Hub, he should have enough time for his email. Then all he has to do is pass out a couple of mugs, see if any late night takeaway is in order, and he can go home. After that kiss with Lisa he's sort of thinking about sitting in the actual dark of his apartment and having an orgasm that involves more private fantasy and less Harkness induced inevitable biological processes, but the chance of him collapsing from exhaustion directly inside his doorway may be too high.

He takes a deep drink from his mug. He's barely slept in the last week. Daily tasks at the Hub keep piling up on top of surreptitiously equipping the sub basement, putting together the plan to move Lisa and of course, being Jack Harkness's equivalent of a stress ball.

The siren sounds and door rolls open as Ianto is about to check into his dummy email account. He turns the computer off without looking, and stands up, ready to look busy.

Harkness walks in alone, soaking wet. He strides over to Ianto, who only gets halfway through "Anything I can get you before I leave for the night, sir?" before the Captain grabs his face and kisses him hard. The remaining embers from Lisa's kiss, flare unexpectedly back up.

"Owen said I should get out of my wet things before I get hypothermia," Harkness tells him, "Could you help me with that?"

Ianto crumples. He's so tired, but he puts on the glaze of good natured cheek that Harkness likes, "Owen didn't say that, you just needed a line."

"It's better than "Hello Ianto, I've had an incredibly shitty day, take your pants off."

A retort about being more honest dies in Ianto's throat and he gives up. Harkness runs his finger along Ianto's jaw line, "You know what I really like to do when I've had a shitty day?"

"I can guess," Ianto replies.

"Take a hot shower. Come on."

He takes Ianto by the hand and tugs him past the entrance to the disgusting, moldy, enormous gym-like showers, and into Harkness's office.

"Jack, what are we-"

"Remember when I said I lived here?" Harkness says. He lifts up the cover to what Ianto is trying very hard not to think of as a manhole, revealing a bunker underneath his office. He waves Ianto toward the door in the floor and Ianto climbs down into a room even more Spartan than his own. Harkness has the same kind of camp bed Ianto has in Lisa's bedroom, though Harkness's looks older. And it actually has sheets on it.

"And the shower's through here," Harkness says, dropping to the floor next to Ianto.

Fine, Ianto thinks, I've been hauling heavy things around and running all day. I probably need a shower.

Harkness leads him into the bathroom and turns the water on to warm up. Ianto had expected it to be as starkly utilitarian as the standard showers upstairs- hardly updated Victorian showers for rinsing off mud, blood and alien goo, but it's a little more homey. Oddly retro, like everything about Harkness, but at least not as creepy a place for Harkness to come up behind him and start undoing his tie, unbuttoning his layers, and brushing his warm, entirely human (well, probably, Ianto has some doubts after all the weird things that Harkness says) hands back up Ianto's bare belly, fanning that little lick of arousal higher. Ianto tries to ignore it, that was for Lisa, what he lets Jack make him feel is just enough for the whole ruse to actually work. Lying still and thinking of anywhere but England is not really an option for Ianto, he has to be visibly _participating_ after all.

But with Harkness standing behind him, pulling off his jacket, his waistcoat, setting his lips to Ianto's neck once his tie and his shirt are gone it's easier to… get into the spirit of things.

In the shower Harkness keeps holding him chest to back, patiently scrubbing him before dropping his soapy hand down to stroke Ianto's cock. Ianto starts to float in a haze of exhaustion, steam, warmth and arousal, getting harder and harder, making little noises that Harkness hasn't heard before because they're hard to fake convincingly. Ianto can almost not think about Harkness's cock, hard against his back and moving lazily.

Then Harkness turns off the water and turns him around and reality crashes back as hard as it did when he set his hands back on Lisa's metal casings. Things aren't better yet, and he still has performances to give, with this liquid heat in stomach quickly getting sickening, because it doesn't belong here, not for this man, even if Ianto doesn't hate him.

Harkness kisses him again, harder than he has before and starts walking him out of the bathroom and toward the camp bed. The warm water on Ianto's skin starts to cool.

"Jack-"

But Harkness just shushes him and pushes him against the bed. The frame hits the back of his calves and he sits down, Harkness's hard cock bobbing in front of his face for a second of dread before Harkness sits next to him and pushes him back into the pillows. He runs a hand up and down Ianto's chest, pinching his nipple's gently before settling his body on top of Ianto's and starting to rock their hips together.

Ianto gulps. He's gone from half dressed hand job to wet and naked in the Captain's bed in the span of a day, he's still hard as hell, and with the doctor coming to the rescue soon, he can probably play his last stall tactic card. In fact… now's probably the time, it's another good "harmless" signifier.

"Jack-" he starts, not even having to fake the edge of worry.

"It's okay," Jack murmurs, rocking a little harder. And dammit it feels good.

"Jack, I've never… not with-"

Harkness kisses him but doesn't move his body off of Ianto's, "I kind of figured," he says with a smile that in any other circumstance Ianto would call kind, "It's alright, this is all I had planned," he shifts his hips against Ianto's again, "This is okay right?," He grins a less kind and much more 'Jack' grin, "I mean you seem to be enjoying it."

"Okay, then," Ianto sighs, "I am."

Harkness goes back to kissing him and Ianto just finds somewhere to put his mind, because his body won't let him take this from it. He comes harder than he ever has with Harkness, finally a treacherously sincere orgasm. And then, his body still in charge, he falls asleep, with Harkness's arm slung around him.

**

Something, a strange thunk or something, pulls Ianto about halfway out of sleep sometime in the middle of the night. He nestles closer to Jack's warmth with a groan and in his sleep Harkness's arm tightens around him.

When Ianto realizes what he's just done, he jolts awake and passes it off as a nightmare when he wakes Harkness.


	5. Chapter 5

Ianto wakes up in the morning covered in Harkness's sweat and spattered with his come, he can feel where it's dried, soft and vaguely chalky on his stomach. He's less bothered by that than he is by Harkness's large, warm palm spread against his chest, Harkness's soft breathing wafting hot wet air over the back of his neck. Big, warm, bulky Harkness wrapped affectionately around him for the third time that week.

This was not the plan. Harkness was supposed to be, Ianto had been told for years he was, some delusional, lascivious, lecherous old rat, known for bedding all of his underlings and a large percentage of innocent passersby. Harkness's little flirtation with Ianto was supposed to have been about sex. When he'd rolled out from underneath Ianto and hired him, Ianto had resigned himself to breathing through and then drinking away a couple of rough buggerings before Harkness lost interest in him.

But no. The man was kind and courageous and thoughtful. Protective of his team. Careful with the psychologically traumatized, obviously lonely, possibly sexually confused, otherwise ignored tea-boy who wakes up screaming and had responded to his quiet, cautious advances.

It makes it so much harder. Ianto can't hate him like he hates everyone at Torchwood One. He's thought briefly about the possibility of telling Harkness about Lisa, but he's too far into the ruse, too far into planning with Dr. Tanazaki, and he realized early on that for every humanely captured and kept Weevil, every police constable retconned instead of assassinated after she managed to track down Torchwood on her own with practically no leads, or carefully tracked, but never apprehended alien tech collector, Owen slices a dead body apart in the medical bay and Ianto is asked to have the blood dry cleaned out of Harkness's coat.

The only thing that propels him out of bed is the fact that Harkness is in it, and allowing the affectionate contact makes Ianto so much sicker with guilt than allowing the sexual contact. If he's already out of the shower before Harkness wakes up, odds are he'll be able to avoid both.

When Ianto gets out of the shower the Captain is naked, groggily digging socks and a white t-shirt out of a drawer in his modest dresser, he looks up and gives Ianto a bleary smile before shuffling toward the shower himself, catching Ianto's chin and kissing him along the way. Ianto's noticed that he's a lot less flashy in his own space. A little bit quieter, slower, more wide blue eyes and insistent hands, less gleaming teeth and suggestive eyebrows. Maybe Harkness puts on a work personality too. It's another thing that makes Ianto like the man who is threatening his sanity with unconscious goodwill.

Ianto takes out the suit he's hung in Harkness's tiny cedar closet, among his pressed trousers and button down shirts, and dresses quickly and deliberately, listing his tasks for the day as he does and trying not to think about a bigger closet, with suits and blouses and dresses mixed in it, that was never opened on weekends except for when jeans and t-shirts had been forsaken in favor of a terribly ugly flannel robe his sister had got him for Christmas, and a silky white robe, with little pink roses on it.

He climbs up the ladder into Jack's office, looking around carefully before he leaves. He's become so invisible to the rest of the team that he could probably walk out of Harkness's office wearing nothing but the boss' braces as they all came in to work in the morning without them noticing, but he wasn't going to risk it. "Tea-boy" was not interesting, "tea-boy appearing freshly showered from the boss' bedroom before the work day starts" was interesting.

Suzie's already in the Hub, bent over her work table. She's getting worse than Toshiko. If she keeps this up she's going to be here more than Ianto, who already keeps a toothbrush and a change of clothes here. She doesn't look up as he passes her desk on his way to the kitchen. He makes a pot of coffee, pours himself a cup and goes down to visit Lisa, who, for the last two weeks, has had the mercy not to ask him about the night he broke his promise to check on her, or why he always visits her so early in the morning and so late at night.

**

Ianto's in the kitchen when he hears the commotion start in the Hub. Owen's yelling. A woman's sobbing, he can't imagine Suzie crying, but it doesn't sound like Toshiko. He takes a step toward the door, then hesitates, grabs an unreasonably large old fashioned bread knife off the counter and goes out in the main room.

Harkness is standing on the lift, Suzie's body at his feet. He's taken his coat off, but there's a huge splotch of blood on the tan jacket he was wearing underneath it. A big head sized circle, with a line dripping down from it. There's blood on his forehead as though he accidentally smeared it there.

Toshiko's covering her mouth with one hand, her other lying on Suzie's arm. Owen's standing several paces back one hand behind his head, staring at the tableau. The woman from last week… Gwen Cooper, is standing a little off to the side, she's the one crying. Jack, and Ianto catches himself thinking of him as Jack for this, takes Toshiko's hand in his own, and moves it gently off of the body, then picks it up under the arms and drags it off the lift.

Ianto quickly sets the bread knife on the computer terminal and pushes forward into the Hub.

"…no, not really- she… she couldn't have," Toshiko is saying, shaking her head.

"She did. Suzie turned on us," Harkness says. Ianto sees the hole in the bottom of Suzie's mouth and feels as though his entire spine has turned to ice. Is this what Harkness does to betrayers?

"Ianto?" Ianto jumps at Harkness saying his name, "I need you to take the lift back up and clean up the area.

"Done, sir," Ianto responds. He hurries to the medical bay and picks up one of the kits made for this very specific type of site decontamination and then takes the lift up to the outside. It's slippery with blood, but he'll take care of that when he gets back downstairs. The breeze ruffles through his hair as he sets to quickly scrubbing off the blood with some help from alien tech, going as fast as possible. Just because he can flash his Torchwood ID and be left alone by any member of the authorities that stops by and finds him cleaning up bits of a body doesn't mean that he can laze about and draw attention. And just because the Plass is usually empty this time of night doesn't mean it'll stay that way.

After all of Owen's autopsies Ianto's able to scoop up the shards of Suzie's skull and clumps of brain matter that spatter the ground with minimal lurching from his stomach, and he can even push down the memory from Canary Wharf, of when he stepped directly into what had doubtlessly been the top of someone's head.

The area contained, he steps back onto the lift, now sticky, and goes back down into the Hub. Toshiko's hand has dropped from her mouth and is now wrapped around her side, her lips pursed. Owen's expression has gone from a relatable shock back to its cynical lines. Harkness is explaining how Suzie murdered three people just to get in some practice with an alien glove then planned to kill Gwen Cooper and go underground. Gwen is pulling Harkness's coat over Suzie's body. Whether Suzie was a murderer or not, it chills Ianto a little bit that every expression in the room has changed so fast. He scrubs the lift clean, unnoticed behind them, listening carefully to what happened to Suzie, mind scurrying to think of all the ways she might have introduced suspicion amongst the team and possibly brought it down on him.

"Nothing leaves the Hub," Jack repeats, "Not without my express permission. If you've got any tech that for some reason you thought wasn't included in this rule I want it brought to my office immediately."

Toshiko and Owen both look guiltily down at the floor. Toshiko starts toward her desk and Owen goes to the medical bay.

Harkness grabs the glove and the knife out of Suzie's purse with a sigh.

"Ianto, with me," He barks. Ianto jumps but the Captain doesn't notice. He leads Ianto, Gwen following behind them, into his office, opens the safe in the wall and pulls out a square metal box, almost like a cage. He reaches inside it and pulls out a lock with "NOT FOR USE" stamped on it forbiddingly. Toshiko and Owen duck back into Harkness's office, eyes still on the floor, as he hands the lock to Ianto.

Bewildered and still watchful, (even with as little as he actually manages to leave the Hub, for the sake of discretion and fairness Harkness should at least pretend to suspect him) Ianto locks away the glove and the knife. Owen and Toshiko guilty place small times on Harkness's desk.

"Go home. Take the morning off."

Toshiko and Owen shuffle guiltily out of his office.

"Jack-" Gwen starts. Ianto surprised at how shaky her voice is before he realizes that she's been retconned, almost killed and then has suddenly had the existence of aliens drop back into her head. He's worked here too long.

"You okay?" Harkness asks her.

She shakes her head unsurely, "I… sure. I suppose so."

"Go home, Gwen. I'll be in touch."

She hesitates for a moment, then hurries out of the office to catch the door with Owen and Toshiko.

Ianto's sweating. He can feel little beads of sweat popping out all over his back. Suzie betrayed Torchwood and shot herself in the head rather than face the Captain. Ianto has not been searched or questioned. He has not been sent home. Harkness is staring broodingly at his desk. Suzie died alone with Harkness. Ianto clears his throat.

"Shall I take care of the body, sir?"

"No," Harkness says, brushing a hand down his face with a sigh, the utterly-in-control-captain part of his persona gone now that the others have left, Ianto relaxes a little, "This is… I should be responsible for this. She's… she was Torchwood," Harkness looks out into the Hub, at Suzie's body, still hidden under his coat and sighs again.

Ianto remembers this, the guilt over not protecting someone in your charge. At Canary Wharf, while he'd been towing Lisa along with him, looking for a way out of the battle another Junior Researcher, Donald, had been following along with them. He and Lisa had ducked behind a corner just as Donald had been spotted and exterminated. They'd seen him vaporized. Or when he was little, six maybe, and he'd tried to stand between his father and his sister. He'd gotten himself thrown into a wall and Rhiannon had still gotten hit.

With a strange bout of fellow-feeling he steps forward and kisses Jack.

"Stay tonight?" Jack asks him quietly, all pretense of the in-control-captain lost.

"Okay."

"Let me just… put her to rest. I'll be back in fifteen?"

"Okay."

He kisses Ianto again, lingeringly, and then turns to leave. Ianto quickly runs down to the basement to say goodnight to Lisa.

**

This is Jack's fault and he knows it. He should have been keeping a closer watch on Suzie. She had always had the potential to become dangerous and Jack knows damn well that people crack in this job. He's seen it over and over again. And _still_ he never anticipates it. He's reasonably sure that he'll see it coming a mile off with Toshiko, he's positive that it's already happened to Owen.

He'll have to keep a closer eye out for Ianto. Twenty-two people survived the battle of Canary Wharf. Out of thousands. Even with the Doctor in the fray. Of those twenty-two, four had been promoted into government on the condition they go through therapy for post-traumatic stress. Seven had committed suicide. Five had retconned themselves. Three had joined Torchwood Four just before it had disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Jack had moved two out to Flat Holm Island himself, and then there was Ianto. Making tea, picking up everyone's paperwork, working longer hours in the shadows than anyone else and wrapping himself so tightly against Jack in his sleep that on the nights he doesn't wake up from nightmares Jack often has to extricate himself, turn Ianto around and hold the younger man's back to his chest to keep from getting squeezed like a ship in the clutches of a giant squid.

Gwen Cooper may work out. She's police, she cares about people. She was concerned about a porter, someone Suzie wouldn't have even noticed, and Owen wouldn't admit to having been a little bothered about. She'd followed his lead when he hadn't told Owen and Toshiko. Jack sighs. What Torchwood really needs is someone like Rose Tyler. But she was lost at Canary Wharf too. Gwen's closer, but still not quite there.

Jack feels like death is constantly piling up around him. He's survived two World Wars, dozens of other battles. Despite his best efforts, Torchwood operatives in Cardiff don't live past thirty. And while he ages slowly, changing less in decades than some people do in a year, he's still aging. One day, if the Doctor never comes, he's going to be suspiciously old to still be working here. And he shudders to think what the death count will be by then. When Toshiko and Owen and Ianto and Estelle and his daughter and his grandson will have been added to it.

He zips Suzie away carefully and slides her into her drawer, then heads back to his room.

Coming back from the dead makes him feel so utterly unhuman. He can explain away his difficulty moving past the forties as just a dandyish idiosyncrasy (last time he'd stalled out around1900, those collars had been uncomfortable, but damn if he hadn't looked hot in them) but no one believes that he can't die until they've seen him come back, so he just doesn't bring it up. It moves him from "boss" to "freak" too fast and he likes to at least be able to pretend to be human around his staff. Jack's glad Ianto's said he'd stay, he's going to human himself all over that boy until he feels like he actually had a life to come back to.

**  
He goes back upstairs, into Harkness's office and pours two glasses of scotch, taking a deep sip of his own.

He wonders what he is to Harkness. They aren't having sex, but he's slept here most nights this week, which, granted, Ianto does because leaving Lisa alone in the Hub makes him nervous, and when he tries to sleep in the flat he keeps being woken by dreams of her discovery without him there to defend her and by the imaginary noise of phantom machines. He keeps clothes in the man's closet, a toothbrush in the man's bathroom. He is not suspected of stealing gear despite having his own rift monitor when Harkness met him as a civilian, and they remain as professional as Harkness's ad hoc administration and large personality allows when on the clock. Lisa had asked him to clarify whether or not he was her boyfriend after their third date. Harkness seems entirely unconcerned with any kind of label.

Ianto takes another sip of the scotch and chastises himself. What does it matter? Harkness is a step in the plan to save Lisa and this little liaison is the first thing he's going to forget about once they're free and safe and gone. Maybe he'll take her to Poland. Or India. Or America. Somewhere away from here. Somewhere Torchwood won't ever find them.

Harkness appears in the door way and Ianto holds out a glass of scotch to him, he takes it gratefully from Ianto's hand and sits down in his desk chair, taking a sip of it before setting it on the desk and pulling Ianto down into his lap. Ianto suppresses an annoyed sigh. When Lisa's better he's going to point blank ask her if she actually likes sitting in his lap or just thought that she should, and promise not to be upset at the answer.

They drink in silence, Harkness absent mindedly stroking Ianto's side with the hand he has wrapped around him. Harkness rolls the chair over to the decanter when they've both finished their glasses and Ianto pours two more.

"Make it a double this time," Harkness says quietly. Ianto complies. He's a little tipsy from the first glass. He tries to remember what he ate today and after a blank moment settles on "not enough". He lies back against Harkness's body and loosens his tie. Harkness's lips pull up at the corners, just a little, not enough for to count as a smile, especially not on him, and he slowly, one handedly undoes Ianto's tie and tosses it on the desk.

If Ianto were to start labeling things this would be strictly in Boyfriend territory. It's a rather more uncomfortable place to find himself in than after-hours shag would have been. Harder to fake, harder to compartmentalize. If Harkness was going to try to take him out for bloody dinner and a movie he was going to be very put out. He starts toying with Jack's collar hoping to speed whatever this is up. He's exhausted and out of suits, he's going to have to get up early in the morning to drive back to the flat and pick up clean clothes for the week. He uncomfortably realizes that this is very much a boyfriend's problem.

"I recruited Suzie," Harkness says finally, "Susan Costello. Probably the most conventional hire I've made in the last… for a few years. Took her out of a post-graduate program. Engineering. Before that it was just me and Robert and Lucia collecting stuff and-"

"Tossing it unlooked at into the archives?" Ianto guesses, he pops the top button on Harkness's shirt.

Harkness squeezes his side affectionately, "Maybe," he takes another sip of scotch, "I think she was a little threatened after I brought Toshiko in."

"Where did you recruit Toshiko from?"

Harkness sips his scotch again, "I think you'd better ask her that if you want to know."

That's intriguing. Ianto files it away and pops another shirt button.

"And Owen?"

"Needed a doctor."

"And you actually _picked_ Owen."

Harkness smirks, "I remember having reasons. I'm sure they were brilliant.

Ianto gulps his scotch, passing tipsy heading toward buzzed.

"I think I'm going to offer Gwen Cooper a job, now that we're down a field agent."

Ianto lets a snort escape him and immediately tries to bottle it back up. Fuck. He had a rule about drinking with Harkness.

"What? You don't like her?"

And now he just has to play it, he reaches out for the next button down on the Captain's shirt, "On the contrary," he slightly slurs his way through "contrary", shit, "I admire her pluck. Hunting down Torchwood several times. Bringing refreshment," he finally gets the button undone, "She reminds me of someone…" he taps his thumb against his chin, "Who could it be?"

Harkness catches his hand and tugs it down to his chest. Ianto follows it down letting Harkness kiss him while he rages in his head. He is too close for a wild card to be introduced. An inquisitive wild card with Harkness's ear. Ianto pulls back from the kiss a little, as long as he and the Captain are doing the banter thing he's got a line, but Harkness grabs the back of his head and kisses him harder, bruisingly. Ah. They've moved past banter onto the needy-one-of-us-just-died thing. Between the scotch and the fact that Ianto never liked Suzie he's worried that he overplays it. But he's genuinely shocked out of being lost in the kiss when Harkness slips a hand between his legs and starts massaging his balls.

"Bed?" Harkness pants.

"Yes," Ianto pants. He doesn't realize until he stands that Harkness managed to unbutton his waistcoat and most of his shirt. He attributes that to the scotch and follows Jack downstairs.


	6. Chapter 6

Harkness' feet have barely hit the floor before he's got Ianto around the waist. He shoves Ianto into the ladder and Ianto moans as the rungs hit him across the back. Harkness is pulling at his already half undone clothes, tugging his shirt out of his trousers, undoing his belt, his zip.

He sets his lips to Ianto's ear, so close they tickle the shell as he talks, and Ianto feels himself flushing instantly. It's always been a sensitive point, Lisa used to sneak up behind him and just trace her tongue along the edge of his ear when she really wanted to get him going.

"You have no idea how fucking hot you are half dressed like this," Harkness murmurs, running his palm up Ianto's bare chest and setting his hand around the base of Ianto's neck, "That whole professional thing peeling away," Ianto shivers and Jack runs his hand back down his chest and inside his pants, and starts stroking him, "And then you're all flushed pink skin, that little bit of sweat you get on your neck," Ianto moans and fists his hands in the Captains's shirt as Jack ducks his head and licks his way from Ianto's collar bone back to his ear.

_Oh I am drunk_, Ianto thinks to himself, _I am so much drunker than I thought I was_. Harkness' face is suddenly in front of him, the rhythm of the man's hand over his cock slowing to a stop.

"Thank you, Ianto."

"For what?" Ianto asks hazily. _What did I do_?

"For staying," Jack says quietly. Jack's hand starts moving again and Ianto leans forward across that minute space between them and kisses him, open mouthed and sloppy. _Drunk , drunk, drunk. _Jack moans and grabs Ianto around the arms, flipping him around and bulldozing him back toward the bed. In the couple of moments that it takes for Ianto to sort his feet out Jack is carrying him. Then suddenly he's been dropped onto the bed cross-wise, his head hanging off the edge, looking upside down at the opposite wall. Jack's pressing down on top of him, panting and kissing his neck, his erection pressing into Ianto's thigh through their trousers.

_Oh shit_. Harkness is going to fuck him. Harkness is big, he's big everywhere. He hauls Ianto further down on the bed, so his head's on the mattress and his ass is just hanging off of it before sliding to the floor on his knees and yanking Ianto's trousers off. _He's going to fuck me tonight, with my shoes still on_.

Ianto clenches his eyes shut, and feels Harkness fling his knees apart, trail the tip of his tongue along the center of Ianto's bare thigh, over his hip bone, kiss and nip all the way up to Ianto's ribs, running his teeth over the peak where Ianto's bottom rib pokes out a little. _Wow, I've lost a lot of weight since London_. Harkness worries his teeth over the edge of that rib until Ianto's squirming then moves back down his body. He buries his head between Ianto's thighs and begins to suck him off furiously.

_Oooohhh_. Ianto's not made of stone. He's been trying to pretend that he is for months, he's been pretending that he doesn't notice the way Lisa's voice goes robotic sometimes, that he didn't realize she could smell Jack on his skin last week, that he doesn't spend every fucking second of every fucking day pretending to be someone else. That he isn't straight, in love with someone else and still more or less sleeping with this man.

That he isn't starting to crave being with Jack like this.

Jack's pumping and licking and sucking so hard the sensation is hovering at the line between painful and fantastic, and the scotch seems to have washed Ianto's reserve away. He's writhing on the bed, twitching and panting and only managing the beginnings of curse words. _Fuck! It's been so long. _

Ianto comes, screaming and shaking. He pops so fast that normally his first instinct would be to start apologizing, but Jack sighs with satisfaction, and Ianto doesn't feel like he expects an apology. Jack licks him clean, before kissing his way back up Ianto's body.

"Ianto?"

"Yeah, Jack?"

"You okay?"

"What?" Ianto can hear his voice now, it's high and quavering a little.

"You're still shaking. And you really, really, taste like scotch," Harkness tells him quietly. Ianto finds himself frozen, overwhelmed again. Part of him wants to just keep shaking, start crying, rage and scream and demand Harkness fix it for him. Forgive him for the whole charade, help him save Lisa and kiss him goodbye.

"You okay?"

Instead he lifts his hand off the mattress, noting distantly that it is indeed shaking like a leaf in the wind and sets it on Jack's neck, running it up into his hair. He opens his mouth to assure Jack's he's fine, maybe pay him a compliment about how he can't remember the last time he was blown like that. But all he manages is a cut off little noise.

Jack gives him a small smile, and kisses him again.

"I hate this century," he sighs, shifting off of Ianto, slipping a hand underneath him. Ianto lets himself be sat up and undressed.

"The others were so much better?" Ianto asks as Jack finishes undressing him, folding his jacket, waistcoat and shirt in half and laying them in a pile. Jack doesn't answer. He gets back on his knees and unties Ianto's shoes, then pulls off his socks. He sets the socks in the shoes and tucks them under the bed. Then he adds Ianto's trousers to the neatly folded pile and brings over to the ladder, where he hangs it over a rung. He strips to the waist and drops his clothes unconcernedly on the floor, then sits on the heap while he undoes his boots, which he shoves aside before taking off the rest of his clothes.

Ianto watches him undress and admires his total lack of self-consciousness. Not just a lack of embarrassment, a lack of showing-off that he only manages down here. _I'm the only one who sees him like this_, Ianto realizes suddenly, _thousand conquest Harkness doesn't have anyone else. He's lonely. _

"Frigid crazy ridiculous shit," Jack finally says, climbing back into bed and maneuvering the covers out from under their bodies. With the same sense sympathy that prompted him to kiss Jack earlier, Ianto pulls himself close to Jack, who covers both of them up, "Do you want to talk about it?"

_Yes, God yes,_ Ianto thinks, _I want to tell you that I'm not sure if I care that Suzie's dead, I want to tell you that I love my girlfriend and don't know how to deal with the fact that I just enjoyed that. That I just want to be happy again for a couple of minutes together. _

_But I can't. _Instead of answering, Ianto shoves the older man onto back and takes Jack's cock in his hand, "Do you really want to talk about this while you're still hard?" Ianto bites his shoulder and starts kissing his way down Jack's chest. He gulps as he reaches Jack's nipples and starts licking around one while he takes a moment to brace himself. He's not sure he's up for this. _He did it for you_. If he can't ignore the ick factor here in the name of gratitude, maybe he can ignore it in the name of debt._ It's just skin. _He tries to imitate the sexy tongue trail thing Jack did along his thigh as he moves down to Jack's stomach. His tongue gets away from him and he feels like a dog licking an ice cream cone.

Jack grabs his arm around the bicep and pulls him back up, "Stop. Not if you're this drunk."

"Jack-"

"I'll live. I'll live and you won't have a drunken teeth mishap, so I'll actually live happier."

Ianto slumps down onto Jack's naked body and feels Jack start to trace his fingers idly over his back. _He just never stops touching people_, "No offence."

"I don't want to talk about it," Ianto lies.

"Okay."

And that's all Jack says about it. Nothing else seems to be expected of him so Ianto drifts drunkenly, losing track of time as Jack's fingers along his shoulder become Jack's palms sweeping across his back and Jack adjusts his position a little so he can suck at Ianto's neck. Ianto's cock starts to stir again as Jack starts slowly grinding against him and Ianto lazily responds, letting Jack elicit those little noises from the back of his throat. Jack rolls them over, so that Ianto's splayed out underneath him instead of loose limbed on top of him like a human blanket and starts kissing all over his body again.

He vaguely recalls something about how he was supposed to be taking care of Jack tonight, but it's not as though Jack doesn't always set the program. Ianto goes along. _Good little tea boy._ And Jack slips his head between Ianto's legs again. Just his tongue tracing along Ianto's cock at first, then taking the tip in his mouth, sucking gently before starting a slow pattern up and down, increasing the pace bit by bit until Ianto's definitely paying attention again.

_This is actually kind of nice. _

Ianto tries to shut the thought down, but it's there. He's twenty four years old, he's been in a serious relationship for the last couple years, the last few months have been hell on earth and now he has one person who takes care of him. Some small sober part of him insists that he take it back, but drunken, exaughsted, aroused Ianto chalks it up to scotch, some variation on Stockholm syndrome and the fact that Jack is really, _really_ good at this.

He reaches down and cards his fingers through Jack's hair.

**

Ianto's actually _shaking_ with today's caffeine high. Dr. Tanazaki has set a date, he's sent a list of pre-surgery steps for Lisa, several of which are extremely hard on her. Ianto had slept in Jack's bunker again, gotten up early and almost gotten caught setting up the doctor's hotel room but at least managed to play it cool this time.

Much cooler than he's managing to play it now. He'd brought Chinese in for lunch, in the hopes that it would keep the team in the conference room while he checked on Lisa and sent a couple of emails, but Harkness had insisted that he eat with them.

So he has to postpone his set of secret duties for later, and he has to deal with Gwen. Once it was clear that the Captain had been serious about hiring her, and that she was serious about joining, Ianto's plan of action had been to simply avoid her at all costs. He hadn't come up in her quickly jotted notes about Torchwood while she tried to stave off retcon induced sleep, and they hadn't really spoken, and he is just a little afraid of her. She's a real beating heart, and a police officer. The kind of person who notices the people around her, cares if they seem a little off that day, and might actually wonder where they disappear to at all hours of the day.

If Ianto's any judge she also seems pretty taken with the Captain, and should she do anything about that it's going to make his position extremely difficult. Which is probably why he protests too much when the team discusses Harkness's sexuality. Though if Gwen can't even detect that Harkness isn't straight maybe he doesn't need to worry about the potential she'll notice anything about him.

He digs into his Chinese food with jittering hands, hoping that eating something will lessen the affect of the caffeine on his otherwise empty system. It doesn't, but that's probably because he doesn't get a chance to check on Lisa until the team finally goes out searching for Carys.

For the very first time since Canary Wharf, Ianto finds himself wondering what's under Lisa's… helmet. It's something that, over the last several months, he has managed not to give a single moment's thought. Is it just fitted over her hair and skin? Or is her actual brain under there, nothing between it and its metal casing but the same black red fluid that seeps out of the wound on her leg?

Ianto's emails with Doctor Tanazaki have let him move past concentrating only on Lisa's survival and forced him into thinking about her recovery. If they can get her off life support, then they'll have to talk about things like skin grafts. Organ transplants. Morphine addiction.

He and Lisa never talk about any of this. She spends all day alone in the dark, Ianto tries to bring happier stories with him when he comes down to visit her. He tells her about the team's adventures which they don't mock anymore. Something he saw on late night TV. Sometimes, when Ianto's very tired, and Lisa's very drugged, they talk about a house in the country. Cows and chickens. Grass and books. As few machines as they can get away with. A coffee pot, washing machine, dryer, car and nothing else. The never say things like "on the run" or "massive bodily scarring" or "partially bionic". If Lisa says anything about Harkness, Ianto changes the subject as soon as he unobtrusively can.

The scarring is going to be hard on her. She's never been the type to obsess about her looks, spend hours getting ready. She's always been more of a sundress and lip gloss kind of girl, but even with the aid of some of the tech Ianto's been cataloguing, it's going to be a painful process that leaves her with an inescapable daily reminder of everything that's happened to them. For his part, Ianto doesn't care if she's more scar than skin when she comes out of this. If he has to wean her off morphine and help her plug in her bionic kidneys to recharge at night he doesn't care. He'll do it. To see her out in the sunshine again, to hold her again, he'll do it. He still loves her like _this_, half machine, which is why the question of what's under the machine hasn't occurred to him before.

Until he sat down beside her tonight, and suddenly wondered if he'd ever wrap his fingers in her hair again. Like he did with Jack last night.

Ianto reaches out to touch her face, and makes a mental note to water down Harkness' scotch.


End file.
